The 5 best brunches with activities in the Twin Cities

Brunch, once the bastard child of breakfast and lunch, is officially a meal in its own right. In fact, it's more than a meal; it's an event. So what does this minx-y blend of eggs Benedict and waffle fries have to offer us besides booze and an opportunity to rehash last night's mistakes? What else can we get to go along with our walk-of-shame meal?

Activities. Here are our favorite brunch time distractions, those little diversions that break up our near pathological checking of Facebook-Twitter-Instagram, all while filling us up with tasty eats and frosty drinks.

5. Bloody Marys and pull tabs at Spring Street Tavern
What do you get when you combine a dive bar with brunch and an innocent game of pull tabs? The best cure for a hangover. For just a moment, forget about Spring Street's $6 Absolut Bloody Mary bar and their all-day breakfast and let's focus on what's at hand: winning some money after spending far too much the night before. Players can win up to $100 in a single game, so it's quite possible today's your lucky day -- and it also looks like brunch might be on you.

Courtesy of Elsie's Facebook page

4. Breakfast burritos and bowling at Elsie's Restaurant, Bar, and Bowling Center
Brunch bowling is the best alliteration since boozy brunch. Bowling is fun whether you're unnecessarily good at it or embarrassingly bad, and the addition of eggs Benedict and $3 bottomless coffee makes this a delicious, just-for-fun-sport spot. Sometimes you need to let out a little aggression after a regretful weekend, and a 10-pound bowling ball will get you where you need to go. We won't judge you if you add the bumpers, but we will judge you if you don't get the breakfast burrito.

3. Eggs 'n' Drag at the Gay 90's
Doing Sunday mornings the right way -- watching Drag Whitney Houston lip-sync her heart out instead of doing the New York Times' crossword -- is the goal of brunch at the Gay 90's. On Sundays, Gay 90's has a breakfast buffet and bottomless mimosas from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Better yet, the buffet is all-you-can-eat, so you can stuff yourself while envying the performers' six-pack abs. It's even child-friendly, if you choose to brunch with your bundle(s) of joy, so treat yo'self. This perfect remix of dinner-and-a-show is the perfect excuse to spend your Sunday recovering from Friday and Saturday over a pitcher of spiked orange juice (this is not-so-child-friendly, obviously). Don't forget to bring plenty of cash to tip the performers.

2. Biscuits, gravy, arcade and board games at Chatterbox Pub
Sure, you come here for a late-night drink with friends, a PG-13 evening with the folks when they visit, and a no-pressure spot to bring your new date, but it's time to rethink the arcade-and-board-game hub where you've become a regular. With a brunch menu consisting of cheddar and bacon waffles as well as biscuits and gravy (just to name a couple), you can now chow down on all your morning meal favorites while playing Atari. And if you need a fun new way to tell your friends about your weekend blunders, grab a game of Pictionary and get to confessing.

1. Bottomless mimosas and bingo at Lush Food Bar
While it looks like an end-is-near scene out of The Sopranos from the outside, Lush is anything but ominous on the inside. It's hard to feel like you're doing brunch wrong with a slew of '90s music videos serenading your every bite, but forget N*SYNC, forget your breakfast burger, and forget everything you knew about this late-morning/early-afternoon delicacy, because Lush has the secret meal ingredient you never knew you needed: bingo. Around the time your Saturday bottomless mimosas come to a close (at a reasonable hour of 2 p.m.), Lush encourages you to grab a dauber and support the Aliveness Project, a charity for those living with HIV or AIDS. So sway your boozy head to the beat of Nick Carter's smooth-yet-whiney vibrato and get ready to stamp the day away.

Keep going with this list. Simply, Bars not Bores. The 60/40 law fucking
ruined the idea of a bar in Minneapolis, replacing every pool table with
yet another high top table to push the food law, and as a result there
is nothing to do at any of the bars except throw money at your server.
Sure, it has been repealed, but the damage is done.